Over the past decade, organizations world over has been in a state of seemingly endless transformation – from adoption of newer business strategies to many forms of technology adoption to do business better and faster. The rapid pace of change in only increasing as stakeholder behavior continue to shift, regulatory bodies exert their influence, markets become global, competition continuously increase and costs shoot up.

There is an eminent need for being agile to anticipate and adapt, become highly efficient in terms of cost – all to remain firmly ahead of the competitive pack. Within IT, one of the monolithic cost elements, the Data Center, is on top of the transformation agenda of most CIOs.

There is a sure-shot strategy to gain agility and cost efficiency that these CIOs seem to keenly look for. Organizations are trying to attain an ever-agile, scalable, reliable and global IT infrastructure that can help them gain competitive edge at the same time support current and future needs of the business.

Business Objectives For IT Spends

Globalization is on top of the business agenda for majority of Indian organizations today. The complex and global nature of business presents an immediate challenge of deploying IT infrastructure on a worldwide scale.

Even within locally growing businesses, there is an eminent need for improved IT infrastructure that is able to cater to increasing business demands from technology – higher efficiency, improved flexibility and scale.

Another challenge facing growing organizations is the stringent regulatory and compliance landscape. Especially in India, efforts to increase regulations and compliance are forcing organizations to change the way they do business. These regulatory factors put further pressure on IT. Globally growing organizations are subjected to domestic and international regulations.

Organizations need to understand risks on real time, and manage their business effectively and efficiently. To meet these changing and complex needs of the business, IT needs to be flexible, robust and scalable while keeping costs low. IT deployments will also have to speed up to ensure that any business change can be timely addressed by IT.

Imagine a scenario where a company wants to start a new business in a new geography or expanding current footprint to a new country. Finding an ideal location, deploying a data center, hiring IT staff, enabling necessary business applications, and the time and expense that goes into doing all this will most likely sink expansion plans from becoming a competitive edge for the organization. It is easier to find and work with an existing IT service provider who has the infrastructure and resources ready to deploy quickly.

Another factor affecting business is the growing need for zero-delay in business transactions. Competition is increasing at such an alarming pace that customer loyalty is no more an easy task for these globally growing businesses. An ecommerce site that delivers fastest page loads is more likely to get maximum customers. Within financial services organizations, high frequency trading has put competitors jockeying for making trading as fast as possible, reducing latency from milliseconds down to microseconds and nanoseconds. All this is increasingly putting pressure on IT infrastructure to achieve high performance and ultra-low latency.

Top among business objectives that become key drivers for IT spending in India are:

Agility?

Managing Risk

Business Growth

Adhering to Compliance

Operational Efficiency?

Latency Reduction

Cost Reduction

Benefits Of Improved IT Infrastructure

In India, over the last 10 years or so, organizations have done tremendously well in implementing state-of-the-art IT systems that have helped them grow and achieve global standards.

These organizations have built data centers and IT infrastructures that helped them grow in the face of economic instabilities, new challenges and opportunities, and business adversities. Unfortunately, most of these infrastructures are running out of capacity to facilitate the next wave of growth for these organizations.

Today, most captive data centers are facing issues of some kind or other – either the infra is too big to house within the company’s premises, or technology has grown much faster than the older data center, or it is simply not enough to cater to dynamically growing business needs of the company.

IT infrastructures that are required by organizations today need unprecedented levels of agility, speed and reliability. Organizations need to:

be able to quickly adapt to change, scale up in the face of newer opportunities, and stay ahead of competition

deploy new products and services faster into the marketplace and achieve lower latency in business

ensure high availability of all business critical resources

Now, creating an infrastructure that is future-ready, state-of-the-art and enables an organization to achieve high levels of agility, speed and reliability can be high on cost, time consuming and extremely complex.

The best solution that companies can take advantage of here is to take help from experts to create such an infrastructure.

Need For An IT Infra Expert – Colocation Solution Providers

As IT departments face challenge of data center transformation, they are looking at better alternatives in order to address the burden of aging infrastructure. Traditional in-house data centers are fast going out of fashion to colocation services.

Organizations are turning to qualified service providers – colocation service providers – with deep expertise in IT infrastructure to host their data centers. Increasingly they are seeing benefits of collocating their mission-critical IT infrastructure.

Colocation is becoming increasingly popular in India. CIOs are seeing the benefits of colocation as a less expensive and more flexible option than building their own data centers.

Colocation is a good choice for those who want complete control over the infrastructure all the while sharing cost and complexities of power, cooling, and space along with other tenants – all this being managed by experts in the field.

Another reason IT leaders are moving towards colocation services is to address limitations of their existing captive DC.

Gain Agility And Cost Efficiencies Through Colocation

Cost efficiencies:

Among the top benefits of colocation services is the cost aspect. Organizations hugely benefit by saving on the huge initial costs associated with setting up their own DCs by using colocation services.

Also, most colocation service providers are equipped with redundant and high-speed Internet backbones that organizations can take advantage of, and save on time and cost associated with setting up connectivity.

Most colo providers offer monitoring and management of the infrastructure thus helping organizations reduce cost of having fulltime, onsite employees to manage their IT infrastructure.

Agility, Speed and Reliability:

By quickly able to setup data center infrastructure and scale up or down services quickly, colocation service providers are able to help organizations improve agility of their business.

Facilities by expert, third party service providers offer better protection against outages and increase availability of their infrastructure. Colocation providers carry ample replacement parts onsite thus reducing the time to repair and replace failed equipment. Organizations can achieve 99.9% to 99.999% of availability and reliability with redundant infrastructure elements, power, bandwidth, etc.

Colocation service providers have hardened security features including physical security, network and access security, etc. With colo, organizations can retain the flexibility to administer and access the infrastructure and applications without cost and complexities of running an in-house DC.

In Conclusion

With colocation services organizations can expand operations with ease at low initial capital. Organizations can scale as per business needs, and create flexible IT systems. They can manage their business, not their equipment – experts from colo providers manage and monitor client infrastructure economically.

Have you been able to improve agility and increase cost efficiencies through colocation services? If so, we would love to hear your experience.

Author : Rishikesh Kamat

AVP of Products & Services, Rishikesh is passionate about connecting with his customer base by delivering satisfaction through "wholesome" service proposition. He has been instrumental in implementing competitive and profitable pricing models and is committed to driving effective marketing promotions to drive revenue.